


some sacred place

by perennials



Category: Haikyuu!!
Genre: Abusive Parents, Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, KRTSK Angst Week 2018, M/M, Non-Graphic Violence, Physical Abuse, i found the tag guys. finally
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-10-14
Updated: 2018-10-14
Packaged: 2019-08-02 00:35:02
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,450
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16294940
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/perennials/pseuds/perennials
Summary: Kei lets his lips curve into a small, candle-lit smile. The night is young, a gentle breeze tip-toeing in through the half-open window. They are sinners, all of them.“Touch me?” he asks.Kuroo leans in, and kisses him again.-Or: Life's tough when you're an angel.





	some sacred place

**Author's Note:**

> cw for an abusive parent, physical abuse, injuries, some violence, some blood. nothing graphic, but it's there
> 
> happy kurotsuki angst (not really i failed) week. day something. prompt was forbidden love
> 
> tsukishima is 17; kuroo is 18

It's like this.

 

Kei doesn't tell Kuroo he loves him because that’s not allowed. He doesn't so much as look at him in school because that’s not allowed. He doesn’t bat an eyelash when Kuroo knocks on his bedroom window at eleven p.m. but chooses to let him in instead, because that’s probably allowed somewhere, somehow, in some faraway world. Kei is familiar with how these things work. Kuroo’s foster parents don’t give a shit about what he does, and Kei’s father doesn’t have to know. It’s that simple.

 

When Kuroo steps into the light with a stupid-sweet smirk on his face, Kei kisses him. That is definitely not allowed.

 

“My father,” Kei says an indeterminate time later, his back pressed to the wall, “would like to see you dead.”

 

Kuroo, who is in turn pressed flush against him, drops butterfly-wing kisses along the line of his jaw. “Your father is an asshole.”

 

“Who wants you dead.”

 

“Doesn’t matter. I won’t get caught. Promise.”

 

Kei’s hands go to the collar of Kuroo’s button-up. He tugs on it insistently, and Kuroo comes back up and kisses his mouth. Kuroo has very nice lips. In another world, Kei thinks people would wage wars for those lips.

 

“What can you do. You’re only human.” He winds his arms around Kuroo’s neck, half-drunk on the sight and smell of him, his half-mast eyes, the sweep of his messy hair. In response, Kuroo feathers his hands down Kei’s sides.

 

Kei hisses, and then recoils internally at the sound he’s made. “That wasn’t supposed to happen,” he mutters.

 

But too late, Kuroo has already stiffened against him. He retracts his hands with surgical precision, retracts every bit of his beautiful self, until not a single part of him is touching Kei. Kei looks at the canyon between them, feels his tiny, seventeen-year-old heart crumple a little in his chest.

 

“You’re hurt,” Kuroo says flatly. There is no questioning lilt to his voice, nothing playful in his gaze; it is merely a statement of fact, cold-cut and precise.

 

Kei shrugs. “It happens. You know that.”

 

He lowers his gaze. Kuroo’s hands are curled into fists, his knuckles bone-brittle white.

 

“Yeah. I do know that.”

 

And he does. The fact that Kei’s father is more monstrosity than man is common knowledge, looms over the heads of everyone in their shitty backwater town like a curse. His cruelty is calm. It is never heard or seen, only felt by those who it befalls. By “those”, he actually means just one person. That person is Kei. Which is funny, if you think about it, because Kei is as far from being a monster as you can get, and yet. And yet.

 

“I missed you,” Kei says quietly, switching tactics. The tension in Kuroo’s shoulders is a palpable thing, and he aches to reach out and soothe the avalanche under his skin. But no matter how much he wants to do that, he can’t do it. The source of one’s pain cannot make it go away. This is the best that he can do. And he  _ does  _ miss Kuroo— they can’t talk in school, and outside of it the pressures of life leave mournfully little time for them to meet. It’s been a while.

 

“Jesus, Tsukki, I missed you too.” Kuroo runs a hand through his hair, frustrated. He worries his lower lip between his teeth, the crease between his brows deepening. “But this isn’t— you can’t live like this. You don’t deserve this.”

 

Desiderata. Things that are needed or wanted. What Kei needs is a place to sleep, a few dollars, a beautiful boy with amber eyes and a sunlit smile. What Kei wants is not relevant. Not in these times.

 

“Only my sides still hurt.” Kei gestures at the crash-sites on either side of him bluntly. He has to be blunt— there’s no way to skirt around this issue, no way to slap a glittery band-aid over the car crash wreckage of his life and say  _ it’s all right, I’m all right.  _ “All right” does not exist when you are Tsukishima Kei. But “better” can, if he lets it. And he wants to let it exist, he wants Kuroo, he’s awfully tired of being himself all the time.

 

Kei lets his lips curve into a small, candle-lit smile. This is the best he can do. Kuroo’s eyes are still sad, and Kei’s probably going to be sad forever (or maybe indifferent is a better descriptor, he’s been him for so long that he isn’t sure if he remembers what it means to be not-sad). The night is young, a gentle breeze tip-toeing in through the half-open window. They are sinners, all of them.

 

“Touch me?” he asks.

 

Kuroo leans in, and kisses him again.

  
  


//

  
  


“Your dad isn’t the only one who wants to see someone dead.”

 

They’re lying on their backs on Kei’s bed, the sheets a mess beneath them. Sweat cools on Kei’s skin as Kuroo talks; it feels like ice.

 

“That so.” His vision is blurry because Kuroo took off his glasses somewhere along the way, the ceiling a smudge of white above him. The weight on the mattress shifts, and he feels, more than sees, Kuroo roll towards him. He rests the flat of his hand on Kei’s hipbone, looking to Kei for permission. Kei nods.

 

Carefully, like one might peel back the petals of a flower, Kuroo pushes the hem of Kei’s shirt up his torso. A smoky pattern of black-blue-purple emerges, blooming across his porcelain skin. It’s— Kei allows himself to think this, he has to be objective  _ sometimes— _ bad. It’s bad. The air in the room is warm, the walls bare. The clock on his bedside table reads  _ 12:33 A.M.;  _ his father has long since gone to sleep.

 

To his surprise, Kuroo doesn’t seize up the way he did earlier. He lowers himself on his elbows, and gently, gently, presses his lips to the edges of the bruising.

 

“Yeah,” Kuroo says softly. “Yeah.”

  
  


//

  
  


Life’s tough when you’re an angel. No one believes it except Kei’s father, who’s an obsessive freak that’s convinced everyone wants to steal his miracle son away and manipulate his powers for their own personal gain. Which doesn’t make sense if you think about it, because he’s the only one who’s ready to accept the fact of it anyway, except he watches Kei like a hawk and somehow has found  _ other people  _ to watch Kei like a hawk for him when he can’t do it himself, too. It’s like hawk-watch. Kei-watch. Keep-Kei-permanently-suffocated-but-not-dying-because-he-can’t-die watch. Whatever.

 

He isn’t even sure if his father became an obsessive creep because they found out he was an angel, or if he’d been one all along. He can’t really remember. His childhood is a film reel with most of the negatives crossed out or missing, and he’s happy with keeping it like that. Regardless of when it all began, the fact is this: one day Kei woke up with a voice in his head and tiny, blood-red marks on his lower back, and everything’s been shit since.

 

The first time his father sees Kuroo, he is standing with Kei in the one-and-only coffee shop in their town. It’s kind of terrible, but kind of terrible is better than completely terrible. Everyone complains that it sucks, and then goes there anyway. Or, at least, most people do; until today Kei has never stepped foot inside, because no one wants to hang out with the weirdo who thinks he’s an angel and has a father who’ll come after you with a pickaxe for so much as looking at his son for too long.

 

Case in point: Kuroo is not only looking at Kei in the kind-of-terrible coffee shop on this fine Wednesday afternoon, he is also talking to him. And gesturing to him. And laughing with him. (This is important; most kids are not afraid of laughing  _ at  _ Kei from afar because no one will tattle on a bunch of long-distance bullies and his father doesn’t care as long as you don’t try and approach him. Kei is used to being laughed at.)

 

Kei’s father is deeply traumatized by the sight. He doesn’t have a pickaxe, but, well, he has his hands, which are strong and calloused from years of handling all sorts of misshapen equipment. He has his anger.

 

After that, Kei never goes to the coffee shop again.

 

“I’ll kill anyone who so much as fucking approaches you,” his father whisper-thunders (it is a unique quality of his, one of the many he possesses, being able to sound like an avalanche even as he keeps his voice low, low, low.).

 

_ Why don’t you kill me too while you’re at it,  _ Kei thinks, dizzy with pain. The tiles of the living room floor are cold where they’re pressed against his cheek, his arms, the flesh of his thighs. He thinks his finger might be broken. He’s not sure. He’s never sure.

 

He’s never sure of anything, so he doesn’t respond. The night wears on.

  
  


//

  
  


Kuroo is the new kid in town who’s staying with the foster parent couple, and the most beautiful boy Kei has ever seen, and he knows how to make a splint. So that’s pretty cool. That’s pretty cool.

  
  


//

  
  


Life’s tough when you’re an angel. Kei has no idea why the fuck God put him here, or what he wants from him. He’d like to know, sure, but there isn’t a twenty-four hour hotline for dialing God when it’s three in the morning and you’re lying in bed beside Kuroo fucking Tetsurou, feeling like your chest might just cave in. Not that Kei’s chest will ever cave in. He’s an angel. Angels don’t do caved-in chests. But you get the idea.

 

In the morning, an extra-early alarm wakes them up. Kuroo crawls back out of his bedroom window while the sky is still a rich, sleepy blue. Kei watches him go. At the base of the old oak tree in his backyard, Kuroo grins up at him, amber eyes flashing like headlights in the darkness.  _ See you,  _ he mouths, or Kei thinks he mouths. You are partially responsible for the reality that you live in. Kei will allow himself to dream this much.

 

He doesn’t feel like a messenger of God. Harbinger of death, maybe, bad luck charm, perhaps, but holy white-robed messenger of God? Kei stabs his chopsticks morosely into his rice, and sighs inwardly. Across the table, his father watches him with the same old hawk-eyes he watched Kei with when he was ten, twelve, fourteen. For better or worse, nothing’s changed. For worse, probably.

 

There’s a voice in his head, transmitted through some invisible one-way phone line from the heavens. It tells him he’s got a job to do. It also tells him he has to “grow up” first. What does “grow up” mean? When will he be grown up enough? Kei has a billion questions and no one to ask them to, so they just rest at the bottom of his jacket pockets like rocks, weighing him down everywhere he goes. Sometimes he feels like a walking monument, made of nothing but heavy granite.

 

When he’s done with breakfast, he washes up at the sink, and then slings his schoolbag over his shoulder.

 

“Don’t talk to anyone outside,” his father says. It’s the same thing he’s been saying for the last two years. Before that it had been “don’t let anyone talk to you”, but recently it’s come to light that his son actually has a soul, so the warning has changed slightly. Minor edits, for a minor child. An insignificant one. Even if he is an angel.

 

“I won’t, father,” Kei intones, already thinking about lunch break and empty hallways, bathroom cubicles with enough space for two.

 

“Good.” Kei grabs his keys. Neither says good-bye. He locks the door behind him.

 

Sinners, the whole lot of them.

  
  


//

  
  


“Why don’t you leave?” Kuroo asks, one time. They’re standing on the steps of one of the fire-escape staircases in the deserted aesthetics block, eating out of plastic pudding cups. The artificial light coming from above throws Kuroo’s face into sharp relief, outlining the curve of his lips, the slant of his eyes.

 

Kei shrugs. He does a lot of that. “There’s nowhere for me to go.”

 

“I—” Kuroo pauses, his voice strained. “Okay.” A resigned sigh. He leans his shoulder against Kei’s, smiles faintly at him. It’s like watching the reflection of the moon on a perfectly still lake. Kei’s heart makes skipping-stone leaps, rippling across the surface of the water. He looks away.

 

“But if there ever comes a time when you can’t take it anymore, Tsukki, I’m here. Promise me you won’t let things get too bad.”

 

Today’s pudding is vanilla-flavored. Kei likes vanilla. He doesn’t like his father or his life or himself very much, least of all the ugly claw-marks on his back, but he likes Kuroo. It doesn’t really matter what happens to himself, he thinks, as long as he still has these small sanctuaries. These quiet moments, the scrape of spoons against plastic, the warmth of Kuroo’s skin. The rest of it is just background static. Irrelevant.

 

Kei shrugs again. Kuroo doesn’t press the matter. He sticks the last spoonful of pudding in his mouth, swirls his tongue over the sticky, almost grainy mess. It tastes artificial. Artificial, but sweet.

  
  


//

  
  


Kuroo is late. The night is growing weary, the trees are bleeding into nothing, Kuroo is late. He said he’d be here an hour ago. Kuroo is almost never late.

 

Kuroo is late, so Kei goes downstairs with his phone clutched in his hand, but the house is empty. All around him, silence, and a single light still burning like a bonfire on the front porch outside.

 

Kei pushes the door open, and he pushes the door open, and he pushes the door open.

 

His heart falls right out of him.

 

Here are the facts: Kuroo is on the ground, and he is bleeding from a million different places. Kei’s father is looming over him like a monster, his torn knuckles glistening and wet. The single light on the front porch burns on and on.

 

Here are the facts: Kuroo is on the ground. Kei’s father is not.

 

Fact: Kuroo.

 

“Tsukki?” Kuroo whispers from where he’s crumpled up like tissue paper, folded in half at the waist. Kei’s father has a foot on his hip, digging roughly into the dirty white fabric of his shirt. The night is growing weary, and it is quiet, so quiet he can hear every word.

 

Kei sees red.

  
  


//

  
  


Life’s tough when you’re an angel. No one believes you’re an angel except for your obsessive freak of a father, and then when someone comes along who touches the red marks on your back with gentle hands and kisses you like a prayer, your obsessive freak of a father tries to kill him. Seriously. Not with a pickaxe, because it turns out that throughout all these years Kei’s father kept a selection of knives and belts and old, bent baseball bats, but he never had a pickaxe. With his hands, and his anger.

 

Life’s tough when you’re an angel, but Kei is a messenger of God and he has shit duties to fulfill “when he grows up”, so he doesn’t kill him. Every time Kuroo winces, every time he lets out a soft hiss of pain when Kei dabs antiseptic against his wounds or accidentally brushes against a freshly-formed bruise, Kei thinks maybe he should have. He thinks of the crazed look in his father’s eyes, the way he’d reached out towards his son with these crooked, crooked fingers, even as he lay helpless on the floor where Kuroo had been mere minutes ago. Whatever. It’s too late for regrets now, anyway. They’re too far away.

 

Kuroo gives instructions, and Kei drives. Neither knows where they’re going for sure or what the hell they’re doing, but whatever happens, they have to leave this town. They want to leave this town. Desiderata— things that are needed or wanted. It’s the same shit everywhere.

 

The highway is long and dark and quiet, which is just how Kei likes his corner of the world. Every once in a while, a car passes them by in the opposite direction. Every once in a while, Kuroo reaches over and fiddles with the dial for the radio station. His pinky is in a splint that Kei made, but the rest of his fingers are intact. Unhurt. Kei thanks God for these small mercies in his head, and keeps his eyes on the road.

 

At five a.m. in the morning, as the sky begins to lighten, they pull up at a gas station. Kei has a few dollars in his pocket but Kuroo has hundreds. He won’t tell him where he got them from, and Kei finds that he doesn’t particularly care. They pay for gas, diet coke, potato chips.

 

Afterwards, they head back to the car. The station is empty save for the half-asleep lady at the cashier, Kuroo’s beat-up Toyota 87 the only one parked outside. They sit on the car hood, sipping on their sodas.

 

“You never promised,” Kuroo says, breaking the silence. “That you’d come to me, or that you’d leave.” He kicks his feet lightly against the car.

 

“There wasn’t really a reason for me to.”

 

“But we’re here.”

 

Kei nods thoughtfully. “We are.” He tilts his head up to the sky; it is a delicate seashell pink, tinged with violet at the furthest edges. Soon, the sun will rise.

 

“Thank you.”

 

Kei chuckles. The truth is, he’d only left because of the blood all over the front porch. It had never been about himself. Tsukishima Kei could fall into the pits of hell for all he cared; the only thing that mattered in that shitty backwater town with its sad, kind-of-terrible coffee shop and its wary, wide-eyed residents was Kuroo. Nothing else, no one else. But Kuroo doesn’t need to know that. Kuroo will probably find out eventually, because he is observant like that, but for now Kei wants to let him breathe.

 

“We could go north. I hear the scenery there is beautiful,” Kei murmurs. He’s never been able to think about what lay on the map beyond the borders of the town he grew up in. He’s never had this much of anything.

 

Kuroo screws on the cap of his diet coke. “Sounds good.”

 

“I hope you know that I don’t actually know what I’m talking about.”

 

A smile— the sweet one, the half-shy one, the one most people will never have the luck to see in their lifetime— blooms on Kuroo’s lips. “That’s fine by me. As long as it’s you, it’s fine.”

 

“Aren’t you being awfully sentimental today.”

 

“Maybe, maybe not. I mean, I’m all the way out in the middle of fucking nowhere with the most beautiful literal angel I’ve ever seen. I think I’m allowed to feel a little emotional.”

 

Kei snorts.

 

Soon, the sun will rise, and they will get back into Kuroo’s beat-up car, and Kei will drive while Kuroo talks about all the dreams he never achieved in his childhood and fiddles with the dial for the radio station until it breaks. Soon, the sun will rise. The voice in his head is saying he should’ve held out for a few more years for the free accommodation, but Kei thinks about the free body paint instead and decides that it wouldn’t have been worth it. Not now, not ever. Heaven almost wants a refund, but too bad— they made him an angel, they’ll have to keep him. With or without a father. With Kuroo fucking Tetsurou and his gorgeous eyes, the messy sweep of his hair. Definitely with him.

 

Kuroo cradles Kei’s face with his hands, still cold and wet with condensation from his soda, and kisses him on the hood of his car, and it’s everything Kei’s never dared to let himself dream of. It is roller coaster rides and helium highs and free-falling upwards with your heart in your mouth and the world in your hands. It is a revelation.

 

Kei kisses him back with fire in his lungs, and when they break apart for air he presses their foreheads together and sighs against his skin. Like this Kuroo is breathtaking, scrubbed raw with the light of the morning sun. Kuroo is a dream.

 

They are sinners, all of them.

 

Kuroo fishes the keys out of his pocket, slides off the hood of his car. “Let’s get the fuck out of here.”

 

“Yeah,” Kei says, smiling. “Yeah.”

  
  
  


**Author's Note:**

> talk to me on [twitter](https://twitter.com/nikiforcvs) or [tumblr](http://corpsentry.tumblr.com/)
> 
> if you're confused, don't worry, i am too. tsukishima is a literal angel only i did zero research so he's just kind of whatever i figured he'd be. kuroo is human. why?????? i dunno either. LOL well if nothing else, it was definitely fun writing a different vibe from what i'm used to. if i had to describe this aesthetic it would be cigarette smoke, even though no one actually smokes. just like. forest mist and cigarette smoke and violin music or some shit. cool stuff  
> as always, thank you for reading dear reader. all kudos, comments, and bookmarks are sincerely appreciated. all comments go straight towards my immediate death. i love you guys
> 
> have a good one


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